Why is a transaction on Ethereum taking so long?

If you notice a sharp slowdown in the Ethereum network, you are not alone. In the near future, unfortunately, it will only get worse. The Ethereum network has recently become so congested that many transactions take hours, sometimes even days. The culprit, apparently, is Tether (USDT-ETH), which switched to the Ethereum blockchain, which currently accounts for 25% to 50% of the network capacity.

On Wednesday, the blockchain was populated with 100,000 Tether transactions in about seven hours. At the time of writing, this figure has dropped to 100,000 transactions in about 16 hours.

The transition of Tether to the Ethereum blockchain is relatively fast, which in the future will further overload the network. In addition, Tether just launched a stablecoin with yuan support on Ethereum.

In addition to Tether, a decentralized gaming platform called FairWin also takes on a large percentage of network capacity. And let’s not forget that Ethereum is popular among other DApp developers.

Coinmetrics data shows that the Ethereum blockchain regularly processes twice the number of transactions compared to bitcoin — about 600,000–700,000 per day.

At the same time, last year, the blockchain processed much more and reached a record 1.4 million transactions.

The difference in transactions can be explained by the fact that tokens like Tether absorb more gas than simple transactions.

Gas is a unit that measures what is under development and how much is debited per transaction. The current limit of 8 million gas has not changed since January 2018, it was then that the migration of Tether began.

Now more and more often calls are heard to increase the “gas limit”, which will effectively increase the size of the block. For comparison, a block of bitcoin is 1–2 MB and is mined every ten minutes, with Ethereum it is approximately 800 KB.

To increase it, various mining pools will have to vote and agree on any changes, although now this is not in their interests.

Many gas problems will be resolved during the upcoming modernization of Istanbul. It will open the door to Ethereum 2.0, which, we hope, will begin to solve the main problems of scaling from the beginning of next year.